5d ago

why are website language switchers in the current language?

This always annoys me. I land on a site that's in a language I don't understand (say, Dutch), and I want to switch to something else. I open the language selector and... it's all in Dutch too. So instead of Germany/Deutchland, Romania/România, Great Britain, etc, I get Duitsland and Roemenië and Groot-Brittannië...

How does that make any sense? If I don't speak the language, how am I supposed to know what Roemenië even is? In some situations, it could be easier to figure it out, but in some, not so much. "German" in Polish is "Niemiecki"... :|

Wouldn't it be way more user-friendly to show the names in their native language, like Deutsch, Română, English, Polski, etc?

Is there a reason this is still a thing, or is it just bad UX that nobody bothers to fix?

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152 comments

In an international context, not everybody speaks English. A Japanese customer wants to switch to French. Which language should the language picker be in?
Alternative is to put the flag of each language next to the name in the picker. That way, whoever doesn't read the current language can at least pick by icon.
- The label for the language picker is an issue, but the choices themselves? In the target language. You want French? You pick "Français". You want Japanese? You pick "日本語". You want english? You pick "English".
  Supposedly, if you'd rather have a website in a given language, you must have some level of understanding of that language, and picking its name should not be a challenge in any case. If you somehow change a site/app to a language you don't know, as long as you can identify the language picker, you'll be able to change to something you understand.
  It does leave out the case of a user wanting to change to a language they do not understand, but I do not care for those.
  
  Perhaps a universal icon for "pick language" would be helpful, like we have a icons for volume control and share. Good luck getting it adopted though.
  
  Why not do both tho? Like "日本語 (Japanese)” So that if I fuck up my languages for some reason, I can turn back
  
  We're saying, don't translate the language's names at all, use what the speakers call their own language.
  English is always "English" regardless of UI language. French is always "Francais", Then you can switch to any language you can read
  
  Yeah, and the comment you just replied to said: why not both? Language name in language up front, and language name in current language in parens. I think it's a neat idea and absolutely would support that as a standard.
  
  My big question would be what would that add? If you speak Japanese, Spanish and French, 日本語, Español and Français would give you all the information you need. Adding the language name in a second language would increase the work to do, while also not really providing any benefit that I can see. If you manage to change the language to Spanish, or are using somebody else's device, "English" is no less helpful for you than "English (Inglés)" would be.
  
  Easy enough. Tells you what languages are supported. Also helps you debug a bad language label. Although does have the disadvantage that you still need the name of every language in every language (the existing state) and you don't get to suddenly sqrt your data requirements for storing that
  
  But you can. Hopefully, you know how your language is called in your language, right?
- Which language should the language picker be in?
  the language of the listed language. Lots of language switchers do it that way
- The annoying thing is, you can't put an image in the default select from browsers. So you have two choices :
  Make a custom select -> it's complicated and will break on some machines.
  Use emoji flags -> windows do not have an image pack for flag emoji, and chrome didn't bother implementing their own (Firefox did), so it displays the initials instead.
  So whatever you do will not be universally supported, thank you Microsoft.
  
  You shouldn't use flags to represent languages
- Have the language in the current language setting and the target language native tongue so you would get フランス語 / French "Alphabetic" sorting would be difficult, so it wouldn't be perfect, but at least a lot more understandable. Still, just having a search option would fix that easily.
- A Japanese customer wants to switch to French. Which language should the language picker be in?
  日本語。

152 comments